You’re probably not going to be seeing much of him these days. He’s become very non-PC.
Pepe is an amorous skunk who is always on the make. He fancies himself a great suave French lover (accent and everything) and is hopelessly in love with a black female cat he mistakes for a skunk. He is completely lovesick to where he’s always stalking her, trying to sweep her into his arms, and the joke of course is that he’s a skunk and she’s repulsed. In short, he’s the poster skunk for sexual harassment.
But that’s today. In 1949 a Pepe Le Pew cartoon won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Today he’s a predator, back then he was a “ladies man.”
Several years ago, in my first play, A OR B? I made a Pepe Le Pew reference and it consistently got a big laugh. Bigger than I would have expected. So for fun I slipped a Pepe Le Pew joke into my next play. Same thing. Loud laugh. At that point I became curious. Was the name just funny? Was it such an absurd putdown to compare someone to him? Why were people laughing at the mere mention of Pepe Le Pew?
In any event, it’s now become kind of a running joke. I put a Pepe Le Pew reference into every full-length play (except one) and he appears in a number of my one-acts as well. The one play he doesn’t appear in is OUR TIME but only because I couldn’t find an appropriate place for it and I will never just shoehorn in a joke.
But I wondered if the Pepe Le Pew jokes would work as well today in this new #MeToo era. A couple of weeks ago I had a one-act play in a festival in Brooklyn that did have a Pepe Le Pew joke. Now bear in mind I’m more than willing to remove them if they’re now deemed inappropriate. They’re just silly jokes. But guess what, both performances I saw, Pepe still got laughs.
Sometimes things work in comedy that are hard to explain. When I’m running a writers room and someone pitches a joke and the whole room breaks into laughter I tell the writers assistant to put it in just like that. Upon reflection maybe the syntax is wrong or something about it seems off, but my feeling is however it was pitched got a laugh so go with that and don’t bother analyzing why it worked when it shouldn’t have.
Pepe Le Pew is now an obscure reference and no longer acceptable in society. And yet, as I was watching the Grand Rapids production of OUR TIME I was thinking to myself – there’s gotta be a place for a Pepe Le Pew joke in here somewhere.
from By Ken Levine
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